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The risks of misdiagnosis of obstacles and solutions:
An example of concurrent support vs. structural design
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The need for an alternative framework has long been recognised in HE
policy and has taken the form of the Extended Curriculum intervention
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but this is designed for a minority of the student intake while analysis
indicates that it would benefit a far larger proportion (probably a majority)
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Current national policy evidently assumes that concurrent support is the
only academic intervention required to bring about the substantial
improvement in ‘mainstream’ student performance that is needed
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yet decades of experience point to the ineffectiveness of concurrent support
as the primary means of addressing structural faults that perpetuate
educational inequalities
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This can be seen as a prime example of assuming intervention in one area
(in this case Delivery) can overcome major faults in another (Structure)
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in contrast, curriculum re-structuring can be a prime example of the value of
innovative design
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‘Reframing the problem, for example by seeing the problem as a symptom of
some larger problem, is a classic design move.’
(Goodyear 2015: 35)
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